Hi.

My Wife and Kasey Bomber’s first book

Sun, 27 Jun 2010 19:02:39 -0700

Obviously I am biased, but this is one good read. So whether you’re a weekly paint-yourself-in-team-colors fan of the modern day legit roller derby, one of the bad-ass players, or aspiring soon-to-be-bruised fresh meat, you need this book on your shelf.

Buy the book at Amazon or Barnes and Noble, then follow Kasey and Alex on Twitter and Facebook. Plus, go see them at a city near you!

“Down and Derby, The Insider’s Guide to Roller Derby” is also available from Powell’s and BookSense.

IN SEARCH OF...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 19:23:42 -0800

I work for The Walt Disney Studios which is going through some well publicized changes. End result could mean I need a new digital media gig.

My resume

WAY AHEAD OF THE CURVE

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:20:22 -0800

Monica and the folks at Husky Labs went to an old radio store in Baltimore and used those images to create the 1995 NPR.org. The resulting page was a bit on the weighty side for that time, when 14.4 modems were all too common and token ring was still around.

Still, this represented a major expansion of the site’s content, and a corresponding rise in the angst and fear from both inside and outside NPR’s walls. This new Internet thing was going to ruin everything. Clearly.

Committees were formed to approve all web changes.

I left for Digitas 3 months later.

THE HUMBLE BEGINNINGS OF NPR.ORG

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 19:11:01 -0800

Imagine this page with no gross yellow background and some crazy colored bullets. That’s what the first NPR web site looked like. Back in 1993 there were precious few design options available through NCSA’s Mosaic web browser. Pretty much everything aligned left and was in one column.

A year later in 1994 NPR’s site looked very much like the screenshot above. There was a similar page for Weekend Edition Sunday.

By 1995, there was a slightly updated NPR.org with a new design by David Levine and Husky Labs out of Baltimore. You can see that design over here.

Note the RealAudio installer on my desktop! NPR was, with ABC, the first radio network to stream audio to the masses (Internet genius Carl Malamud had been doing it using higher quality codecs, but it wasn’t widely available). Real Audio sent many member stations into crazed fits before they too realized streaming was critical to their future.